Hope Solo’s sex life makes more news than the struggle of the world’s best athletes for basic gender equity. I open this post with those four words, “Hope Solo’s sex life,” because public fascination with her, as a woman — meaning, as a sex object (google searches of her name are usually in the pursuit of “nude pics”) — means that this post might get more traffic than would a post that leads with its true subject, a gender discrimination law suit.

Of course, if you’ve landed here looking for nude pics, by now I’ve already lost you. Instead of nude pictures of Hope Solo, I’ve given you a blurry screen grab of Brazil’s women’s national team, circa 2007.

In 2007, the year they knocked the US women’s team out of the World Cup in one of the most shocking upsets ever, Marta Viera da Silva and her insanely gifted teammates begged the world for help: their national federation had all but abandoned the team. The team had to fight to get access to the money they won in previous tournaments, their training schedule was irregular, and their support team at tournaments was inadequate. Their intervention made no news outside of light reporting of the incident by Brazilian media. Nothing changed. If anything, things have gotten worse. In 2011, Brazil’s federation (CBF) didn’t bother to order the team uniforms. They were sent to the World Cup in Germany wearing shirts for the men’s team.

That a team would do something like unfurl a protest banner at an award ceremony is a big deal. Logistically it is harder to do this than it is to raise one’s fist from a podium.

But of course, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos did just that, the world’s eyes were upon them. They were at the center of the sport spectacle. Women athletes are eternally on its margins. We have only peripheral vision when it comes to their gestures of protests. A fuzzy screen-grab.

Sixty national team players from around the world are now participating in the gender discrimination complaint filed against FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association. That is twenty more players than when this complaint was filed a month ago. The jump in the numbers of women willing to identify themselves as in conflict with the World Cup’s governing bodies was provoked by the threats of retaliation circulating through national teams—players from Mexico, Costa Rica and France were told they’d either be dropped from the squad if they didn’t withdraw their names—or their national football association was told they’d lose any bid to host the women’s world cup. Instead of bullying these players into backing down, these actions galvanized them.

Women athletes care about the sport, but the sport’s governing bodies do not give a shit about them.

And mainstream sports media doesn’t give a shit about that. I’ve been blogging about this stuff for seven years: the only thing that has improved is player-activation as resistant subjects.

Mainstream sports media only pays any real attention to the US Women’s National Team when they are in competition, and only after they’ve made it to the semi-finals. The day in, day out grind of women’s sports is not news worthy. There is not a news/sports editor in the US who will tell you that women’s sports is, in and of itself, newsworthy. Those outlets will instead vomit bullshit stories about transfers and free agents and the post-game interview in which male players and managers explore a verbal universe of infinitely expanding empty space. Every day, hours and hours of bullshit about men doing nothing in particular.

The public conjured by mainstream sports media cares more about that empty space than it does about anything women athletes accomplish.

How else to explain the fact that Canada was the only country to bid for the 2015 tournament? Even though the women’s championship tournaments have been successful, as mass sporting events. And they are much less dogged by controversy—they do not require displacement or military occupation of whole communities, for example.

FIFA accepted a bid that gave up grass for the women’s matches—in Canada, of all places—while accepting another bid built around the elaborate, delusional promise of grass in Qatar!

As FIFA downgrades the Women’s World Cup, women lose the incentive to play it. When FIFA failed to solicit a decent bid for the Women’s World Cup, it ought to have stopped the process and started over again—by proactively developing World Cup bids, in partnership with potential host countries.

Downgrading the Women’s World Cup makes playing the World Cup less desirable. And as FIFA’s indifference to the women’s game becomes more and more obvious to players, they must ask themselves why they bother.

In the VAST majority of cases, women actually give up resources in order to compete on their national squads—many don’t receive much more training than they would otherwise. They get better training from their European and US clubs, and those clubs have rightly earned their loyalty. Most national team players don’t receive a living wage through their participation in this level of competition, almost none receive commercial endorsements. Most have other jobs, and many are the primary caretakers for their families. Participation at the international level turns their lives upside down.

These athletes deserve to play on grass.

A player like Megan Rapinoe comes out as gay to the media and it makes news for a few days. The NFL throws Hope Solo under the domestic violence bus, hoping to distract media from the real story (violence is endemic to its culture—the league takes no responsibility for the damage it does to players and to the people who love them)—and it works. Hope Solo’s private life makes more news than does the fact that Abby Wambach—a player no one associates with the word “political”—volunteered herself as the lead complainant in this case.

Abby Wambach should be on the cover of Sports Illustrated for this. This is a tremendous assertion of her power as an athlete—and her determination to make a difference in the game.

Should players walk out, as a fan I would frankly be over the moon with gratitude. They really should strike. What is there to lose?

Let’s show the men how its done—because as far as I’m concerned men players have been absolute chickenshit when it comes to standing up to the OUTRAGEOUS corruption in their game!

We fans of the women’s game need to stand with Abby Wambach and with her colleagues. We need to stage our own boycott of the tournament, petition sponsors to withdraw their support and plan our own protests from the stands!

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Most sex discrimination complaints break down not around the original discriminatory action, but around retaliation. Threats of retaliation escalate the problem created by the defendant’s sexism. They demonstrate a disregard for the process; they are easier to track and to prove. They are, also, against all sorts of laws.

So how does FIFA respond to the sex discrimination complaint filed by 40 women players, regarding FIFA and CSA’s decision to play the Women’s World Cup on artificial turf?

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I was watching ESPN the other day and caught a VERY fleeting glimpse of Marta in PUMA’s “Forever Faster/Calling All Troublemakers” commercial. This campaign’s narrative is centered on Usain Bolt, but framed by a series of other athletes, including Mario Balotelli and Marta. Depending on which national/linguistic edition of the ad you watch, you might catch a glimpse of Marta in a hot tub. All of the athletes appear in hot tubs. The only women athletes in these ads are Lexi Thompson (golfer) and Marta. Thompson appears in the tub with men, of course. Marta, kindof wonderfully, appears in a hot tub with a man and a woman. Nobody is near her. One must assume PUMA couldn’t handle putting her in the hot tub with only women.

I am picturing Marta arriving on set.

She throws on a bikini, as required. She’s body proud, doesn’t mind really. She leaves the dressing room, and heads to the set.

There she sees two men in the hot tub, and refuses to get in it.

Puma might use the word “troublemaker” to brand itself as badass, but Puma isn’t actually badass. It’s a corporate brand looking to sell out even the feeling of disenfranchisement. If it was really bad ass, it’d have had Marta in the hot tub with a gaggle of blond women draped over her just as they are draped over the men.

Marta demands women for the hot tub. This is what the male athletes get, after all. She declares: It’s sexism! Don’t they know she’s filed a law suit about this sort of thing? Negotiations ensue, and someone proposes that she climb into the hot tub with what looks like a straight couple. She says fuck it, OK. Collects a check that is, of course, much smaller than Balotelli’s and Bolt’s. Whatever.

Below the version of this ad with the most seconds of Marta that I could find.

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Point 81, in the law suit filed by women players against the Canadian association and FIFA.

One of the mysteries of the decision to play Women’s World Cup matches on turf is why one would need to, when there are existing alternatives, like BMO Field in Toronto. Not one Women’s World Cup match is currently scheduled in Toronto, even though it has a great option in BMO—located right in the heart of the city. It’s downright bizarre.

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Click on the link below to access the actual complaint filed by women players against Canada’s FA and FIFA. Seems like a pretty clear case to me—but then again, the Laws of the Game define women as a debilitated group for whom all aspects of the game might be adjusted to address their limits. It’s actually written into the FIFA bible: Women are like children and old men. The World Cup could be played in 15 minute segments and that would be totally legit.

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99% Invisible, a San Francisco-based independent radio program exploring design practice, posted a wonderful, hour-long documentary on sound production for sports broadcasts. It’s totally engrossing. “The Sound of Sports” was produced by Peregrine Andrews, and originally broadcast in 2011 on BBC Radio. LISTEN HERE.

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Why did I click through on this? It’s Taylor Kwellman and Alexi Lalas advising Hope Solo to sit down, like a good girl. When ESPN covers women’s sports equitably, then it can stage this discussion however it likes. Until then, I don’t care to hear Twellman and Lalas opine about what Hope Solo should or shouldn’t do. This story gets more play than does the fact that USWNT players are gearing up to sue FIFA! ARGH.

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Commercial sports media is unrelenting in its sexism; it is no better or worse than the leagues, teams and schools that give the media its headline fodder. The sports media’s framework for conversations about gender, violence and power is not formed by any feminist intelligence—quite the opposite. The media reproduces an ideology of sex which presents gender difference as a difference in species. On some fundamental level, media pundits love stories about “domestic violence” because it lets pundits (mostly men) luxuriate in a patriarchal language about women’s absolute vulnerability/monstrosity. (Media discourse tends to present women as both at once—the victim who seeks out abuse; the victim who asked for it etc.)

This level of institutional sexism is, in fact, a much bigger problem for women in the sports world than is, say, rape and intimate partner violence. This sexist super-structure not only allows gender-based violence to flourish; it requires the violent demonstration of women’s weakness, women’s essential vulnerability. (Ann Travers describes this matrix as “the sports nexus.”) If, say the coach of your team is demanding sex from his players, exactly where do you go for help? Do you go to your national football association—run by men who are as bad, if not worse? How, people ask, as they tune into 48 hours of weekend broadcasts of men’s sports, are these abusers allowed to get away with treating women like dogs?

A world of absolute gender segregation requires heavy enforcement. That enforcement might take the shape of passive acquiescence to the idea that “this is just the way things are” (“well, I can’t report on the women’s football season because editors don’t think that women’s sports is a story—what can I possibly do?”). It might shape the public’s sense of “interest” (“watching women’s sports is boring”). It might take the form of disavowal — a turning a blind eye (as did various people working with Sandusky at Penn State), or self-censorship (“If I come out my career is over”/”If we hire him, we’ll lose our fan base”). Enforcement takes those shapes, as well as more “active” forms—sex-based harassment and worse (e.g. locker-room abuse, gang rape). In media reporting on gender and violence, the active and the passive combine.

For the media pundit, all of these cases are all the same. This is, in fact, how sexist and racist ideologies work—the media discourse will move towards a “there are two sides the story” structure. Given that there is no way to produce a story of Janay Palmer as the aggressor from the image of her knocked unconscious, we must find some other woman—a woman who is violent just like men are violent. And thus the turn to Hope Solo, who faces fourth degree assault charges stemming from a (by all available accounts on both sides) chaotic, drunken, violent confrontation with her half-sister and 17-year old nephew. Solo’s case is still pending: it was a brawl—and it’s unclear how it got started. The situation was bad enough, however, to merit the charges advancing through the system. Her teams are standing by her. Seattle Reign have been clear that they’ll take appropriate disciplinary action pending the outcome of the court case.

Solo’s story, it must be noted, does intersect with that of the NFL—Solo’s marriage began with another brawl, also involving a group of people. The police were called out in the middle of the night to respond to a “disturbance.” Her fiancé, Jerramy Stevens (who played for the Seattle Seahawks), was arrested on suspicion of assaulting Solo. The charges were dropped. It was another woman, not Solo, who went to the hospital with a hip injury, and a third person was also reported as injured. Solo’s brother blamed the fight on a few unknown men who crashed their party. The fight, consistently reported by the media as domestic abuse, involved eight people at a party that “got out of control.” Is Solo a victim or an abuser? Or something else?

The idea that Solo is an abused partner/abusive partner makes for a good story: “Hope Solo is the Ray Rice of women’s sports.” Women—just like men, except they get away with more!

It is a very sad fact that people in abusive situations get caught up in violent conflict; they can get caught up in the system. They mark each other, and end up marked. I don’t know Solo, I have no idea how to understand these stories of drunken brawls except as an indication of the ubiquity of intense, alcohol-fueled violent conflict in her family—a reasonable take, especially if you’ve read her memoir. In some situations, especially from a depersonalized distance, you can’t see the difference between the abuser and the abused. Violence circulates. This is one reason why police will sometimes take all parties involved in a fight into custody. It is a reasonable assumption that Solo was at risk of being an abused partner. But that Stevens was arrested does not make this so. Similarly, in Solo’s current case, we can’t know exactly what went down—even when the court deciding the case comes to whatever conclusion it settles on.

It is also the case that the court system is woefully inadequate when it comes to addressing intimate partner violence, and that throwing people in jail is no solution to the problem. Community based, restorative forms of justice are rarely discussed in these situations, but they should be. But, then again, where women and mainstream sports are concerned, there is nothing to restore. There is no community to repair.

What we have now is: men talking about men, men coaching and administering men’s sports and women’s sports, addressing an audience imagined as men — women are exiled to a separate and totally unequal system. We get the occasional public sacrifice of gender non-normative people like Caster Semenya (the difference between men and women must be enforced!), or the ritual hanging of problem masculinity (almost always black men) — these figures render the systemic discrimination which defines the NFL, ESPN and just about every apparatus handling the sport spectacle into an anomaly (Semenya) or a managerial problem (Rice) to be resolved.

All of this is to say that it just isn’t helpful to equate Solo with Rice, or, for that matter, Rice with Peterson. Or to imagine that the solution is to pillory any of these individuals. The answer certainly is not to sweep this level of crisis under the rug, but there must be something better than the facile moralizing which seems to be the order of the day.

There are lots of reasons for separating out Solo’s case from those plaguing the NFL and other sports. There is a whole category of precedent-setting Title IXrape casesinvolvingfootball playersand programs. The entire culture/sociology/economics of mainstream men’s sports is defined through intensely gendered forms of brutality. Penn State didn’t happen because people ignored one incident, or downplayed it. It happened because the entire system is set up to protect masculine forms of power and authority.

I recall here that in 2010, there was not one meaningful story published in US or UK-based sports news about the fact that the head coach of the South African women’s football team was sexually abusing players — that this was happening through the men’s World Cup, almost certainly with the knowledge of people at the South African Football Association. It’s hard to believe that FIFA administrators were ignorant of this. And I’d frankly be surprised if that was the only national women’s team that was poisoned by this level of sexual harassment. In 2009, the biggest story in women’s sports was a series of ludicrous fouls conducted within a regional, amateur women’s soccer game that happened to be recorded and broadcast (that in and of itself is a rarity). Everyone reported that incident like it was news.

There are months when it seems that women only appear in the sports pages if they win a world championship or file a rape accusation. So I guess we should be glad Solo’s personal life is so awful, so explosive. Were it not, the US’s win over Mexico and Solo’s shut-out record wouldn’t have appeared in the news as the footnote it is to the story “no one is talking about.”

All of this is to assert that the media’s relationship to women is itself violent. And as long as the day-in-day out struggle of women athletes—to win games, to set world records, to win appropriate support for their sport—remains the story that “no one” is actually talking about, no one gets to indulge the fantasy that a woman athlete’s domestic assault charge is “the same” as that faced by a multi-million dollar male athlete playing for a billion dollar business run by and for men.

U.S. forward Abby Wambach tells one from the time she and her now-wife, Sarah Huffman, were backstage in a VIP room in January 2013 before the World Player of the Year awards gala in Zurich, Switzerland. “[FIFA president] Sepp Blattercame into our little area, and he walked straight up to Sarah and thought she was [Brazilian star] Marta,” says Wambach.

“Marta!” Blatter said, hugging a bewildered Huffman, who doesn’t look much like Marta. “You are the best! The very best!”

“He had no idea who Marta was, and she’s won the award five times,” says Wambach. “For me, that’s just a slap in the face because it shows he doesn’t really care about the women’s game.” Read the rest of Wahl’s story here.

Blatter has not only met Marta Viera da Silva many times; his organization has used her and Wambach as alibis for the “good work” FIFA does for the world. Marta is not just another great player—she functions quite specifically as a poster-image for the world game.

There’s a lot more to say about the incidents recounted in Wahl’s article—but that one moment speaks volumes. Imagine if Blatter mixed up, say, Kaká and Klose. (Men in suits—who can tell them apart?!) Given the difference in the game’s scale, however, the bar of our expectations regarding Blatter’s ability to recognize women players is actually quite low. One would expect him to be familiar with only a handful of people who look nothing like each other—Wambach, Marta, Nadine Angerer, Birgit Prinz, Homare Sawa and Hope Solo. Sepp Blatter can’t even manage THAT.